The Tragic Unsolved Murder Of Jill Dando

[Music] hello everyone and welcome to my channel so recently I was in London and we stayed in an air B&B and they had one of those like Roku type things where it had a bunch of different media on it and they had a documentary on the home page and it was about someone named Jill Dando now a lot of you probably know who Jill Dando is I as an American did not know who Jill Dando was and it was the first time that I had ever heard of the case BBC recently put out a documentary on it even though it happened a long time ago but I decided to watch it and I was really blown away by this case and the fact that I had never heard of it I was really surprised so I decided that I definitely needed to cover this case because it was really really interesting to me and it is still unsolved to this day which is truly mind-blowing um but let's go ahead and get into the story so this is Jill Wendy dando and she was born on November 9th in 1961 in Weston England her parents were Jack Dano and when a friend of Mary Jean dando and she had an older brother who was quite a bit older than her name Nigel and he was also a journalist for the BBC Radio Bristol when Jill was only three years old it was discovered that she had a hole in her heart any blocked pulmonary artery and so she had to have surgery on January 12th of 1965 but she had a good recovery and this did not stop her from achieving success in her life and Jill always knew that she wanted to be a star but really involved in TV in any way shape or form jill attended Greenwood junior school rural comprehensive school and Weston college and while she was at Weston College she was the head girl which is kind of like the student body president she also attended the south gal Morgan Institute of higher education in Cardiff Wales and it was there that she studied journalism her brother and father ended up working for a local weekly newspaper called the Weston Mercury and Jill ended up having her first job there as a trainee reporter in 1985 she started to work for BBC as a newsreader for BBC Radio Devon and later that year she transferred to BBC Southwest where was a presenter for the regional news magazine program called spotlight Southwest in 1987 she worked for a television Southwest and then BBC spotlight in Plymouth and in early 1988 Jill transferred from regional national television in London to present BBC television news specifically the short on our segments that aired on both BBC One and BBC Two from 1986 until the mid 1900s and in 1989 she started dating a man named Bob Wheaton who was an executive at BBC she regularly appeared on a bunch of different shows actually such as breakfast news at the BBC one o'clock news the six o'clock news and she was also one of the hosts on a really popular TV show that still popular to this day called crime watch Britain's most important unsolved cases now live you can help solve them in 1996 she and Bob Wheaton actually broke up and in December of 1997 Jill actually met a new guy and this was through a blind date his name was Alan farthing and he was a gynecologist actually who was in the process of getting divorced from his wife at the time and once Alan's divorce was finalized he and Jill finally announced that they were engaged on January 31st of 1999 and they already had their wedding planned for September 25th of that year so on April 25th of 1999 Jill hosted the first episode of this show called antique inspectors which is basically a show about antique collectors and hunters that travel all around the UK looking for hidden treasures and heirlooms that are really old and the following day she was supposed to host the six o'clock news Joel was also booked to host the British Academy Television Awards on May 9th so needless to say her career was going extremely well she was very very successful in TV and truly living her dream she was very personable she had a way of connecting with the audience and making you feel like she was just a normal person just one of us she was described as someone who was always well put together and kind and really never had a bad side or a bad moment she was a very genuine person and cared about everyone else around her and was interested in people and in the last two years of her life things were going really well she was really successful and her career had kind of skyrocketed and at this point she started to have you know all the nice cars and the fancy houses and just living a luxury life but she remained a very down-to-earth person which people really gravitated towards but on the morning of April 26 1999 Jill had spent the night at her boyfriend Alan's house in Chiswick and Jill had another house but it was really only somewhere that she was going to occasionally because she was in the process of selling it and she pretty much lived with Alan I'm not sure exactly why she went home that day but she for whatever reason after leaving his house went back to her house and she didn't even make it into the door she approached the door at 11:32 a.m. and when she walked to the door someone came up behind her grabbed her and kind of pushed her down to the ground held a gun to her head and fired it off now the crazy part about this is the gun didn't even really make a sound because it was so close to her head that the explosion happened like in her head and it kind of muffled it so not many people knew that she was shot it's not like this big gunshot rang out and everyone heard it at first even police didn't know that she was shot which I'll explain in a second so no one even immediately knew that Jill had died it took 15 minutes for one of her neighbors to come upon her she called the police at 11:47 and this is the call confidentially it looks like it's killed he's breathing she's got blood coming from her arms the blue [ __ ] just breathe it if the latest chests going up and down oh my god no I don't think she's alive don't worry I'm gonna get some help thank you so as you can tell from this call and just how this happened Jill was not in good condition she was taken to the nearby Charing Cross Hospital where she was sadly declared dead on arrival at 103 p.m. and she was only 37 years old Jill Dando known and loved by millions has been brutally murdered so at first the news got it wrong and thought that she had been stabbed to death like I said when the police got there they weren't able to tell if she had been stabbed or shot because no one heard a gunshot and there was so much blood that they thought it would might have been a stabbing and after looking closer at her gunshot wounds they realized that the attacker held her down held the gun up to her left temple and that's where they fired the shot and one of her neighbors actually did say that they heard Jill scream but they thought it was like an excited scream like she was greeting someone she hadn't seen in a while I did hear a commotion but at the particular time I didn't think whatever the commotion was I heard the scream and that's when he went to his window and he saw a six-foot tall white man walking away from Jill's house around the age of 40 now he didn't think anything of this because he didn't hear the gunshot and he didn't see gel she's on the ground Jill's funeral took place on May 21st 1999 in Clarence Park Baptist Church in weston-super-mare she was buried right next to her mother in the town's abdun Road Cemetery so the Metropolitan Police launched a police investigation and they ended up referring to this as operation ox burrow but when this started there are literally no leads of who could have killed her now obviously the media was really obsessed with following this crime because Jill was one of them this was shocking to the BBC cast it was shocking to their crew this was shocking to really any journalist around the world there was so much speculation about her murder because so many people were fans of jail they were used to seeing her on their TV for a long time so to have someone be murdered like this really freaks people out and people were invested and within six months of this happening the investigation interviewed 2,500 different people and they had taken more than a thousand statements but still came back with no leads they truly had no idea why anyone would want to kill gel I mean she really didn't have beef with anybody she was such a kind person who would want to hurt her maybe it was someone who was a fan of her and was obsessed with her or maybe it was someone that she had wronged in the workplace or was it someone who she had a relationship with romantically maybe a secret relationship people were starting to run wild the rumor mill was going some people were wondering if she was killed by just one person or if there could have been multiple people involved which i think is unlikely I think the fact that no one saw this happen chances are it was probably just one person so a lot of people speculated that maybe it was someone who watches her on crime watch maybe a criminal who doesn't like something that she said or maybe it was just someone who's obsessed with crimes and thought it'd be interesting to take out the person who talks about that maybe she had talked about a crime and she knew too much information and someone didn't want her talking about them anymore so this is when they looked at all of the previous cases that she had covered on Crimewatch they looked into about 30 different people that they thought may resent crime watch in some way and they ended up discounting all of them but then they started thinking that her death may have actually been a planned attack because NATO bombed the radio-television of Serbia headquarters and ended up killing Serbia's main journalist who was pretty much the equivalent to jail so because of this people thought that maybe this was Serbia getting payback you know taking out one of theirs you know an eye for an eye type situation but investigators looked into this idea and make really came out with nothing they really think the likelihood of that being the reason is very very slim and as far as evidence that was found at the crime scene there wasn't a whole lot to work with the bullet case that was found had really small indentations around the top of it which made people think that whoever had used this gun somehow tampered with the bullet and maybe tried to take the Gunpowder out ahead of time to make the gun quieter which I think would make sense because you'd still hear it if someone was shot I get the whole concept of it being muffled but still it feels like you'd probably still hear that so this is when police start to think that it was likely some type of obsessed stalker someone who knew gel from watching her on TV and saw her saw their opportunity and went on it but then at the same time it's hard because for someone to pull something like this off they must have had luck on their side because they had no way of knowing that Jill was gonna come home she was not being stalked they looked at camera footage of her on that morning and no one was following her stalking her I guess they could have been doing it secretly but I don't know it seems unlikely it seems kind of like it was sort of a random act of hate because the gel was never at this house this was a rare occurrence making it really lucky for whoever it was to have stumbled across her if they wanted to commit this crime which also makes police think that it's probably just one person if it was just like it you know spontaneous act like that but could it have been someone who really was stalking her watching her on TV oftentimes when famous people get killed that's one of the things you think about so months and months passed and they still hadn't made any progress in her case and eventually a year snuck up on them without any progress and they were starting to get a lot of pressure from the public to solve this case people wanted answers of why this happened to Jill Dando her family wanted to know for what reason and it wasn't until one day that they were just looking at old tips when they came across one that they hadn't really fully looked into before and it was about a man named Barry and the tip came in from an organization that helps disabled people and Barry was one of their clients they found out that his full name was Barry George and soon an officer went to interview him now Barry had a lot of difficulties with his upbringing he had attended schools in the past that were for children with disabilities and after leaving school he had no qualification so he ended up working as a messenger at BBC television so that kind of sparked a red flag for them he was on a six-month contract there but the job only ended up lasting five months so Barry lived about half a mile from Jill's house which is interesting and he also had a history of stalking women and just being the general creep not only that but he had wanted to become a police officer and he was denied from that so after that he pretended to be a police officer so this guy had a bit of a record and because he lived near Jill and his history he was put on surveillance and they also executed a search warrant on this house they found a couple of things for one they found a ton of undeveloped film rolls and once they were developed it was discovered that these were all pictures of women and then one of the pictures was of him wearing a face mask and holding up a weapon and it was confirmed that this type of gun could have been the type of gun that he used on Jill if he did it they also found a bunch of different notes that he had taken on people's license plate numbers and their corresponding addresses which is so weird he also had maps um that led to many different women's houses in that area they also found a gun holster and some business cards for people that deal guns and an addition and this is probably the most creepy is he had a bunch of pictures of Jill Dando cut out and another thing that was found was a long coat which a few people who claimed to have seen the man said that he could have been wearing and it was actually found that there was a very very small amount of gunshot residue in his coat pocket and this gunshot residue had the same chemical makeup as the gunshot residue that was found in Jill's hair and around her gunshot so because of this on May 25th Barry was arrested for the murder of Jill Dando and on May 28th he was charged police hunting Jill dandas killer have arrested a man on suspicion of murder one year after the shooting detectives say it's a highly significant development while the police told us this morning that somebody had been arrested on suspicion of Jill's murder and while we were very interested in that development like everybody else we just have to wait and see what progress is now forthcoming so Barry's child didn't begin until February 26 of 2001 which is two years after Jill had been killed and on July 2nd of 2001 Barry was convicted of Jill's death and sentenced to life imprisonment but despite them sending Barry off to jail the public was really concerned with this outcome because they felt like there just wasn't enough evidence against Barry like it just wasn't a strong enough case to give someone life in prison basically all they really had was a particle of firearm dust a particle like a tiny tiny little bit which they do not use his criminal evidence in most courts and that was just found in his pocket and that can happen in so many different ways you can literally pick up little particles from people as you walk by them so it doesn't really hold up as great evidence at the end of the day and because they didn't find this jacket until way after she had died we don't know what the jacket could have been doing all that time or he wore it any other time so Barry appealed the court many times and by November of 2007 he made his third appeal and it was granted so the original verdict was completely voided and a new trial began the trial lasted eight weeks until August 1st of 2008 and it was there that Barry ended up being acquitted of this murder when you go into court and any criminal trial you're innocent until proven guilty or so they say but what they're saying effectively is oh you're guilty for your innocence how can that be and it was kind of mixed opinions in the public like a lot of people were just happy to have someone behind bars and they figured this guy's so weird he has all this weird stuff but his intelligence was not quite high enough to commit a crime like this that's basically what the defense said is that his intellect and his IQ he just wasn't capable of committing a crime like this there's a strange it might seem toast for her family because obviously that they have been wronged and you know they've not been the world I believe hold on can't be positive that they've not been told all the truth of the matter of what's happened now I'm not sure what I think about it I think there's definitely a possibility that this guy could have done it I mean I really do I think it's very strange the circumstantial evidence but that's at the end of the day that's all it is and there's definitely not enough evidence to prove that he is guilty in a court of law period and not only that but before his trial they determined that berry was actually on the autism spectrum they also studied him and realized that he had several different personality disorders so if he really had a bunch of different problems going on he had antisocial personality disorder hysteretic personality narcissistic possibly paranoid as well as fictitious disorders and ADHD and he was also said to be epileptic and have a IQ of only 75 but what is interesting is even though he was done working for BBC after only five months he kind of stayed obsessed with them ever since he regularly read their in-house magazine called Arial and it was reported that he had major obsessions with the celebrities and people on TV and had several copies of Jill's memorial magazines so really at the end of the day the only strong evidence they had since they can no longer use the gunshot-residue thing was the fact that he was obsessed with jail and people that have autism often do have obsessions so it's very very possible he did not do this and it's just not fair to lock someone up for the rest of their life just because it seems that they may have done something but since his acquittal many tabloid magazines have published that he actually did kill Jill and that he also had harmed other women but these stories were pretty much [ __ ] so he ended up getting a large sum of money for these newspapers for printing false information about him but this leaves Jill's family and friends and co-workers with absolutely no answers and it's really just devastating Nick Ross who was Jill's co-host helped create an academic Institute in her name which is really really cool and with the help of Jill's fiance Alan the two of them raised about 1.9 million for this and on April 26th of 2001 the second anniversary of her murder the Jill Dando Institute of crime science was founded at the University College London on August 2nd of 2001 a memorial garden designed by the BBC television Ground Force team opened in Grove Park and the garden was made of plants that were all of her favorite colors the BBC set up a bursary award in her memory which enables one student a year to study broadcast journalism at University College Falmouth but of course there are some other theories when it comes to Jill's death that people have come up with so I wanted to touch on a couple of those even though they're just theories one theory that's really interesting is apparently one of Jill's friends which we have no way of confirming that it is actually someone that Jill was close with called in a tip that Jill had heard a bunch of really big names in the media industry including DJs and you know journalists and stuff that were involved in a human trafficking ring which this is completely just speculation and basically this person said Jill was getting ready to expose this information and whoever didn't want her to do this decided to take her out but there is absolutely no evidence for this and we're not even sure if this anonymous source actually knew Jill this one's really interesting so basically during Barry George's retrial his defense team was given over fifty thousand documents to review and one of those was a letter from a man named Wayne area and he was an Irish Republican Army member who was in prison for murder of a man he committed two months after Jill's death and he allegedly stated in a letter that Jill had been targeted by the IRA because of her links to crime launched and he said that she was shot in a four-man hit squad which he was part of and he said that he was confessing all this because he believed there was a government cover-up of the IRA and as we understand this police have looked at this confession and have decided to not pursue it likely because the sky is full of it and most recently this past month an anonymous hitman has come forward and claimed that he knows who killed JAL there's an investigative journalist named Mark Williams Thomas and he was given access to police files where they had over a hundred suspects that had not been like fully looked into and he claimed to meet with one of these men anonymously and this man claims that he knows who killed Jill and they basically looked at some names of possible hitmen and then said that there were a couple different men that he thinks could have done it like names that stood out to him but he said he would never identify anyone specifically because it is much too dangerous so but mark has submitted this information to police and has urged them to take a second look at the case with fresh eyes and they have agreed to do this so there has been a little bit of a light at the end of the tunnel here for Jill Dando recently because there has been some recent coverage on the case this new documentary and then this tip which is kind of getting the public grief sparked up again so maybe this case will be solved one day it is super super bizarre how this happened it's hard to say if this person was even going after Jill specifically or if they even knew her just because of her being there by chance and this not being something that really could have been planned out it kind of seemed like it must be something random but at the same time why would they go after her specifically it does kind of feel like it must have something to do with her job or her fame in some way but at this point we really don't know I truly hope they saw this one her family is just desperate for answers through even why this happened they don't even really want to know who did it as much as they just want to know why it was done because it was so bizarre and unneeded Jill Dando seemed like a really great person someone who could have been hugely involved in so many different current media stories over the past like 20 ish years since she's been gone just a tragic story something that was so senseless and stupid so let me know what you guys think do you think that Jill was targeted because of her fame or was a random attack that just happened beyond someone famous and let me know if you have any other theories or have heard any other good theories but that's it for me today guys I hope you're having a good one stay safe and I will talk to you next time [Music] you

Channel: Kendall Rae

Views: 852,828

Rating: 4.9501672 out of 5

Keywords: kendallraeonyt, kendallrae, kendall rae, crime, mystery, crime documentary, cold case, id discovery, investigative, dateline, true crime, crime watch daily, cold case files, crimewatch, jill dando breaking news, cliff richard, jill dando funeral, jill dando, bbc, mile higher, unsolved, documentary, investigation, investigate, unsolved mysteries, supernatural, buzzfeed unsolved, bella fiori, kendaily, timmothy pitzen, 2020, news, bbc news, creepypasta, jayme closs, the murder of jill dando

Id: bU1tgqVPP1s

Length: 23min 30sec (1410 seconds)

Published: Tue May 07 2019